Milorad Pavic (1929-2009)

Milorad Pavic, the Serbian writer “whose novels upended the traditional relationship between reader and text, taking the form of dictionaries, crossword puzzles and much else,” has died in Belgrade from a heart attack at the age of 80. As a New York Times obituary by Margalit Fox observes, his novels were “Dreamlike, playful and formally unorthodox … like hardbound hypertext in their insistence on offering readers alternate, nonlinear ways of navigating a story. His approach made him a lineal descendant of nonlinear novelists like Cervantes, Laurence Sterne and Jorge Luis Borges.” Pavic’s most famous work, Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel in 100,000 Words, a novel about “a real-life Turkic people who had largely disappeared by the 11th century,” was, says Fox, “Organized like a dictionary” entries, which the reader is encouraged to peruse at random …. It can also be read (or not) as an allegory of the turmoil that has roiled the Balkans for centuries.” It was issued in two editions labeled “male” and “female,” the only difference being “a single paragraph, buried deep in the novel.”  The author suggested, “If you have chosen the male or female version, read it and then find somebody who has the other.”